France votes: Macron expected to win big

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President Emmanuel Macron’s party expected to win majority of seats

A landslide victory will help Macron carry out political and economic reforms

Macron’s La Republique En Marche party and its political ally, the Mouvement Démocrate, MoDem, are likely to win between 355 and 365 seats in the 577-seat lower house, according to forecasts from CNN’s French affiliate BFMTV.

That margin of victory would give Macron, a pro-European centrist, the large majority he craves to further his political revolution — and would inflict a further blow on the country’s traditional ruling parties. The conservative Les Républicains and their allies trailed with about 125 to 133 seats, according to BFMTV.

The center-left Socialist Party and their allies are projected to win 41 to 49 seats. Party leaders began reacting to the projected results soon after polls closed closed Sunday evening.

The far-right National Front stood to gain 6 to 8 seats.

“This evening despite an alarmingly low turnout, the triumph of Emmanuel Macron is indisputable, the defeat of the left is unavoidable, the defeat of the Socialist party is without appeal, the right is facing a real failure,” said Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the leader of the Socialist party.

François Baroin, the leader of Les Republicains, also remarked on the low turnout.

But he told BFMTV that Macron was “the artisan of this victory” and wished him success.

Macron’s party, founded just a year ago, won the first round of elections on June 11 with less than half of eligible voters going to the polls.

Turnout again looked set to be low for the second round. Nationwide, it stood at just over 35% as of 5 p.m. local time (11 a.m. ET) on Sunday, France’s Interior Ministry said on its website, significantly down compared with the same time in the 2012 election.

Macron won the French presidency last month without the support of a traditional mainstream party, as his newly minted En Marche! movement helped carry him to a convincing election victory over far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.

How the elections work

To win a seat outright in the first round of voting, candidates had to win more than half the votes, which must account for at least a quarter of the registered voters.

If no single candidate managed to achieve that target, then all candidates who won at least 12.5% of registered voters advanced to the second round. The winner from the second round will then advance to Parliament.